


Déjà Vu All Over Again

by SyllableFromSound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (also all ships are background ships sorry!), Angst, Backstory, Canon Backstory, Families of Choice, Gen, Identity Reveal, Platonic Relationships, So much angst, ned gets fucked over, thieves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:31:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyllableFromSound/pseuds/SyllableFromSound
Summary: "The thing was, Ned 'Astute' Chicane never forgot a face. It had been indescribably useful in his former line of work, one in which frenemies and associates, his fellow thieves and cons, rotated through a dozen aliases and identities without warning. When a Reginald on Tuesday became a Martin by Thursday, it was handy to be able to take one look at a guy and remember whether or not he was the type to screw people over. He knew on sight whether they could be bribed or bargained with, whether they were a rat, whether they would stab him in the back, whether they would stab him in the eye.But then this Audrey--'Aub-rey,' she enunciated slowly when he got it wrong for the third time--this Aubrey was familiar to him, but in what context, he had no idea."Ned has a friend, and then he doesn't. Story of his life. (Ned & Aubrey's relationship throughout Amnesty. Spoilers up to episode 27!)





	Déjà Vu All Over Again

If Ned were being honest--and he hadn't been, because he almost never was, with others or with himself--he would have said that he knew from the moment he met her.

It was an inkling, at first. Just enough to make him do a double-take when he saw this girl, this kid with a-bit-too-large eyes making her look always alert. There was a hunger about her, and he knew hunger when he saw it, the kind that made cavities inside the body and that couldn't be filled up with food. It was something in her slightly sunken cheeks and long, thin limbs, and every time he looked at her he felt a niggling in the back of his mind like a hairpin inside a stubborn lock: _Where have I seen you before?_

The thing was, Ned "Astute" Chicane never forgot a face. It had been indescribably useful in his former line of work, one in which frenemies and associates, his fellow thieves and cons, rotated through a dozen aliases and identities without warning. When a Reginald on Tuesday became a Martin by Thursday, it was handy to be able to take one look at a guy and remember whether or not he was the type to screw people over. He knew on sight whether they could be bribed or bargained with, whether they were a rat, whether they would stab him in the back, whether they would stab him in the eye.

But then this Audrey--"Aub-rey," she enunciated slowly when he got it wrong for the third time--this Aubrey was familiar to him, but in what context, he had no idea. It was like remembering a string of notes but neither the words nor the title of the song. Sometimes she painted herself neon with the shiniest and brightest makeup she could, gave herself a face like a bicycle reflector. Like she was afraid of not being seen, disappearing in the dark. That, for some reason, was when he really thought he had seen her before, when she was alight like that. But he didn't recall knowing anyone who dressed that way. Damn it. He was getting older. He was sure of it.

And then, a little while later, he watched her catch fire.

And though her hair had been longer and duller back then (twisting up and snapping in a wind he couldn't feel), and though her now-slender arms had then been more on the gangly side (dangling from her like dead weight until she raised her fist), and though she kept her feet on the ground now (she had been lifted as if suspended by wires), he knew. The light of the flames struck her cheekbones just as it had that night three years ago and that's how knew it was her, and that it was just his rotten luck, or maybe the just punishment of some god he'd never seen, that even in podunk Kepler he would run up against his past and that the one out-of-towner who actually decided to stay would end up being the one--

No. It was impossible, definitely. The odds were too long. There was a resemblance, maybe, but Aubrey didn't look that much like the girl from the house. And anyway, even if it were true, who could prove it? No one. Not even him. He shook his head to knock the idea out of his brain. He had more pressing things to deal with, like saving his own hide from the amalgamation of fangs and eyes in front of him. And so, because the thought was not useful, he tamped it down.

That didn't mean he found it easy to look her in the face for a little while after that. The day after their first fight with a monster, he sat in the hospital parking lot and argued with himself for twenty minutes before going in to see her. She was asleep, and he thought for half a second about trying to wake her or waiting until she got up herself. But then, he assumed it wouldn't do much good either way, and he turned around and left.

To say that Ned had never been interested in having kids was an understatement. Heaven forbid. What would he have even done with one? Carted them around in the back of his black van and pretended the six police cars on their tail were playing tag? For that matter, who would he have raised them with? There hadn't been anyone since Mosche, and if there were anyone less fit for fatherhood than Ned, it was him.

That door had all but closed to him at his age, anyway. He was glad of it. He thought of having kids and could only imagine how he would fuck them up. He thought of pouring every resource into a tiny person until they turned into a big person, grew to hate him, and left. No, thanks.

So it wasn't out of any fatherly instinct that he started talking to her. It was just that he knew that look. He hadn't meant to pry, but he had been sitting in the lodge's lobby, early for a Pine Guard meeting with Mama and the others, when he saw her and Dani leaning into each other's space. As they talked, they kept shrinking back just before they could touch foreheads. But Aubrey's puff of tight curls kept brushing the other girl's skin. She mouthed the word "bye," ducked her forehead for a moment, and then placed a careful kiss on Dani's cheek as though it were a fragile thing. When Dani departed, she kept beaming in her direction for awhile afterwards.

Then Aubrey turned to the window and saw him. That was when he realized that he'd been staring. There was the look, the jolt of alarm that knocked the grin off her face. The look of being caught. He recognized it, alright.

She recovered, though not entirely. As she walked in and sat down, she did not quite meet his eyes.

There was no noise for a time, aside from the tick of the clock above the fireplace and the rhythm that she tapped out on her knees with her fingers. Then, Ned attempted, "Have I ever told you about my master criminal origin story?"

She rolled her eyes, in a way that was both rude and somehow not unfriendly. "We all heard about you stealing Audrey Hepburn's necklace from Breakfast at Tiffany's, Ned."

"Oh, no, no, this was well before I took on any big targets like that." He paused. "Though I'll have you know that trying to pry off her roof tiles in broad daylight without getting caught was no easy--"

"Ned."

"Alright, fine, fine, you've heard it. What I was going to say is that I got my start back in the dinosaur era, when I was a high schooler."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yep. Started picking locks to impress boys."

Though he was not looking right at her, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the way her head snapped towards him. She smiled, and after she let a breath out she looked like she had gotten rid of a weight. Recognition.

"Yeah," he continued, "there was this lacrosse player who...well, you know what lacrosse players are like, eh? Anyway, he always talked about breaking into the school greenhouse and sleeping out there. Bucket-list thing for him, I guess. Well, guess who learned to pick the lock for this kid? Ned 'Impeccable Judgment' Chicane."

She chuckled, then pursed her lips, as though considering. At last, she mumbled, "Did it work?"

"What?"

"Was he impressed?" She went on before he could answer. "I figured out how to pick my classroom door's lock in the third grade. I was liberating Spud. Uh, Spud was our turtle, like a class pet, but her cage was way small, or at least I thought so, so I broke into the room to get her out. Is that really--damn, could I have used that to impress cute people all these years? Dammit! How'd I never think of that?" She ran a hand through her hair, and he couldn't help but smile.

"Of course it worked. I was very good. I mean, we got caught and suspended later, but before that? He thought I was pretty damn smooth." She laughed again, and he waited for her to stop before he went on, "But, well, it seems like Dani's pretty impressed with you already, if you don't mind me saying so."

She grinned down at the carpet beneath her feet. It wasn't quite embarrassment, he didn't think, but rather a surge of joy that added an extra warm tint to her deep brown cheeks. "Thanks, Ned."

Always she was moving. He got the idea that if someone ever tried to take a candid photo of her, it would inevitably come out blurred. Her fingers worked constantly, pulling back her cuticles or igniting small flames or clacking the Snapple caps she always seemed to keep in her pockets. That, perhaps, was why she had tried for the whole stage magic thing. It kept her hands occupied. Even with the real magic she had now, she practiced her flourishes and sleights-of-hand constantly. Little interlocking rings. Cards slipping into and out of her sleeves. Coins disappearing.

"Is this your card?"

Head in his hand, he gave a sardonic grin to the three of clubs she had produced from her sleeve and shook his head.

Aubrey turned the card towards herself and gave a look of mock surprise. "Oh, what a mess! This card might be a little worse for wear, but don't let appearances deceive you, Mr. Chicane!" (She had never, even when they had first met, called him "Mr. Chicane" at any other time except when she was performing. He had appreciated that.) She scrubbed the card against her shirt as though to clean it and then flipped it around to show him again. Miraculously, it had become the three of diamonds. "You can always find diamonds in the rough."

He chuckled and clapped exactly three times. "Nice job. I didn't see you pull the other card out from under your collar that time."

"Ugh, you're no fun," she grumbled, dropping the act. "You're supposed to at least try to buy into it."

"Hey, I've gotta be a skeptic! In order to be good at bullshitting, first you gotta know how to spot bullshit. That's how I'm able to scam other people."

She huffed. "Yeah, you know bullshit alright, Ned."

He shrugged and took another bite of his Slim Jim. (Aubrey had wrinkled her nose when he had offered her half. Well, more for him.) For a few quiet moments--or moments that would have been quiet were she not flapping the card back and forth absently--they sat in their headquarters in the lodge's basement. "Aubrey, can I ask...why stage magic?"

She answered immediately, enunciating, as though it were a rehearsed line like any of the ones she would utter during a show. "Because people told me not to." Before he could respond, she quickly went on, with an effort at evenness, "I know you probably think that's a stupid reason, but it's the truth."

"Heh, well, Aubrey, I'm not the sort of person who can really talk about doing what people tell him."

Her mouth had been open to say something else, but instead she glanced at him, then grinned. Her shoulders dropped a little. "Yeah, I guess you did super rob a lot of people, huh?"

"I most certainly did. Is that the only reason, then?"

She tapped her toe, then her heel, against the wooden deck. "It's not that I'm doing it out of spite, so much," she said slowly.

"I didn't say you were."

"Right, but like, people assume that when I say that, you know. But it's more like...I know people think it's a joke, right? I'm not dumb. And the more people think that, the more they assume it's impossible, the more I want it. What's there to having magic powers, if not to make people believe you can do impossible stuff?"

"I hear you." He heard, and he understood. He supposed that he had hungered for the impossible, too, when he was younger. Why else steal Clooney's Oscar than to prove he could? Why else stomp out of his parents' house with a duffel at sixteen, leaving his mother weeping into the chest of his father--his impassive, shale-faced father, whose grayish countenance was hard and brittle enough that it would crack before it ever loosened or bent--and set out on his own? It had probably been wrong to leave like that, he knew now, but the idea of right and wrong hadn't crossed his mind at the time. He had simply been daring something, finally, and that had felt like it had to be something good.

He looked at her and wondered when he had last risked, really. At some point, he had started going only for the sure thing. The easy thing.

Like so many other times, he thought he recognized her. But this time, it wasn't that he thought she was the girl from the burning house. There was something else, in her youth, that was familiar to him in a different way.

Sometimes, she scared the hell out of him.

Sometimes, what freaked him out was the lingering suspicion about who she was. Now and again, when the light hit her a certain way, the thought would come to him again like a bump in the night. Something that shouldn't have scared him--it wasn't real, just his imagination--but left his skin crawling anyway.

That was becoming increasingly less common though. Mostly, he was damn near terrified when he saw what she could do.

Had he turned his head to one side or the other, water was all he would have seen. The wave had encircled him in shining, glassy blue, as all-encompassing as the roar of its rolling. Of course, he did not turn its head to one side or the other, because his neck was fixed in place, like the rest of his rigid body, paralyzed before the wall of water cresting up and up and never ceasing in movement. It reached its apex, rearing like a striking snake, and then momentum led it down--

"Ned, look out!"

There was a rush of hot air behind him, and the laws of physics were suspended. There, in front of him, the water stopped. It hung over his head but did not reach him, as if gravity itself had stopped cooperating with the abomination.

And right behind him was Aubrey, palms straight out in front of her.

Her ability to bend the will of the world scared him, sure. But what frightened him more, what was more unfathomable, was her ability to leap into the path of a wave primed to swallow her and tell it _no_.

He tried to give her a shaky grin, but she looked forward without seeming to see, wide-eyed.

Later, when things had gone quiet, and when he had finished convincing some deeply confused insurance agents over the phone that yes the Cryptonomica's water damage had obviously come from a burst pipe, he found her.

"Aubrey," he started, then faltered. People had saved him before--Mosche, for self-serving reasons, and Victoria, for reasons he still tried to wrap his head around--but he had seldom thanked them for it. There was no way not to make it awkward. "Thanks for, uh...your...judicious use of magic back there. You, hah, really saved my slow ass there."

She sat on the curb with her chin resting between her knees, eyes locked on the yellow dandelion that had slipped up through the concrete. It took several seconds for her to react at all, and when she did, she shook her head quickly. It was as though his voice had taken time to penetrate her brain. "Yeah...yeah, Ned, don't mention it." She spoke in a soft, slow voice, only half-present.

At the risk of sliding this conversation even further into awkward territory, he ventured, after several moments, "You, uh, holding up okay after all that?"

"Yeah. It wasn't the monster freaking me out or anything, I just..." She flicked her forefinger against her thumb over and over again, like one striking a match. Indeed, more often than not, orange sparks shot off. Then she glanced at him. She seemed to be weighing cost and benefit, as he did so often. "It's just, for some reason I started thinking about my dad when I stopped that wave."

He swallowed his saliva. This was not the sort of talk he had ever in his life been equipped for. Just her saying that had activated his flight-and-flight mode, which was like the fight-or-flight mode, except that there had only ever been one option for him. But, shit, she looked sad. So he turned toward her and waited for her to go on.

"Today, I was just like...I don't even know. You almost beefed it, you and Duck both, and it scared me, and somehow it got me thinking that if something were to happen to my dad, or to me, neither of us would know about it for awhile. We don't talk enough for that." She stopped the finger flicking and instead clenched her fist around the fabric of her pants. "Whatever, I don't know."

"No, I get it. There are...things you want to tell him, maybe?"

"Yeah, exactly. You know what that's like?"

"I do." He nearly said, I don't recommend it, but there was no need to open that can of worms. No need to make it about him. He returned to his shop that evening and remembered whose shop it was, really, even after all this time, whose shop it had always been.

He hadn't known about the mother.

In fact, he knew almost nothing about the accident, beyond what he had seen for himself that very night. When he had passed by a newspaper stand with a flaming building on the front page, he had held back his bile and looked away. He had decided not to read the paper for weeks afterward. He had been too afraid of learning exactly what he was learning right now, lying there under the fluorescent hospital lights that he could see through his eyelids, listening to Aubrey and Mama speak softly so as not to wake him.

No killing. That had always been the one rule. He could bring himself to sink to any other low, but he could always assure himself, still, that he was a good guy, well, a decent guy, well, not completely heartless because he refused to kill. He avoided being detestable that way, he told himself.

Well, he always had been a liar.

He had killed a woman. He had killed a girl's mother and maybe killed the girl, too, in some way, killed the person that she had been before that night. How does someone so young go through that without metamorphosing under the strain, turning into someone harder to recognize?

He had done it. Even if he hadn't been the one to start the fire, he had done all of it. And somehow, he had known it, deep down, all along.

See, Ned "Fucking Coward" Chicane feared many things. Just because he was part of a big monster-hunting and -hiding conspiracy didn't mean he feared any less. It might have seemed that way on the outside. True, he was beginning to grow numb to claws and yellow eyes and pain. But now he was afraid of other things. Of being useless, hurtful, hated.

He was afraid of looking Aubrey in the eye.

So if anyone thought it was bravery that made him jump into his Lincoln and speed down a snowy hill after a train, they were wrong. It was one result of the fear that he was, in fact, a bad man, and part of his frenzy to prove himself wrong.

Aubrey leapt in too, of course. She would have, whether he had tried to argue against it or not. She was brave, for real. As they careened down the slope, shouting over each other, and as she leaned over to grip his steering wheel with one hand and cling to his arm with the other, he saw the way in which they were unalike. She was running towards something, while he ran away.

He wasn't sure he would have bailed out of the car when he did, either, if she had not prompted him. His panic had turned him tunnel-visioned, enough that he barely escaped getting his body tangled up in the twisted wreckage of his loyal old car.

"I'm proud of you, Ned," she said when it was all over.

Her hand was on his shoulder and she was smiling at him with sympathy. He made eye contact with her for the first time since the hospital and saw that, of course, she still knew nothing of who he was, and that's when a new thought of the niggling sort came into his mind: _This could work_. For now, he could let her believe that he was alright. What good would it do right now, anyway, to hurt her with the knowledge of what he had done? There was time enough to tell her all of it. And in the meantime, he could keep trying to atone.

 _This could work_ , he kept telling himself, even after he found himself beginning to avoid her, when her eye turned as orange and bright as the pendant that he had taken from her home.

To Aubrey, he wasn't anything like a father, not really. He knew that. She had one of those already (but not a mother, he always recalled, and every time he did, he felt tempted to replace the memory in his brain with a bullet). He was, at best, a weird uncle. But a good kind of weird, apparently, judging by the way she seemed to seek out his company now and again. Like an uncle, he was less prone than a father to judge or give a lecture. It meant that, once in a blue moon, she swung by the Cryptonomica by herself, despite her distaste for the web-footed monkeys in formaldehyde and the taxidermy chimaeras.

"Remind me again where you got all this crap from?" she called, tapping on a display case showing the vertebral column of a mermaid. (Most people were unaware that mermaids' unique biology gave them bones made of plaster.)

"Oh, a little from here, a little from there," he said with a flippant wave. To avoid looking at her, he busied himself with invoices at his desk. Twenty minutes to closing time, the winter sun had already set, and they were the only two people still in the shop, with the exception of Kirby, holed up in the back. He considered calling Kirby out for some mundane thing or other. He avoided being alone with Aubrey nowadays. "By the way, Aubrey, what are you doing here?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Can I not be here?"

"No, no!" He waved his hands out in front of him. "No, of course you can. My...my friends are always more than welcome. It just seems that maybe, uh, you'd rather hang out with someone like Dani or Jake than some old dude like me."

She sighed. "I'm...procrastinating, I guess."

"Oh?"

He heard her inhale, as if to speak, but no words came immediately. That was when, finally, he dared to look up at her. She had her back to him, shoulders scrunched. "I was gonna call my dad on the payphone across the street, but I turned in here instead."

"Did you..." He hesistated, felt his way. "Were you going to tell him something?"

"Not in particular. I just feel like I wanna talk, like, for real. We used to talk all the time. I think, just...I know I didn't ever tell you, but my mom died, about three years ago."

He felt about ready to throw up, as her voice strained with the effort of telling him what he already knew.

"My dad and I were both...really fucking hurting, obviously, and I don't think he knew how to help me, aside from getting me a therapist, and I sure as hell didn't know how to help him. And I left home so soon after that, just to get away from where it all happened...I don't know. I wanna be able to talk to him about real shit again. Like, he's my dad, you know?"

Her voice caught. He took a few steps out from behind the counter before stopping. Of all people, he wasn't the one to comfort her about this. But then, he was the only one there. If not him, who?

He wasn't going to hug her. He didn't even know if she'd want that. Instead, he settled for a placed carefully on her shoulder. "Um...he'll be happy to hear you, I'm sure."

She smiled as her odd eyes shone.

The next time she stood in his shop, she burned, like she had that night. Everything about her burned, her hands enveloped in flame and her glaring eyes. Even the blood pouring from her leg--his eyes kept flicking to the puddle on the floor with concern--seemed to give off a hot red glow. The tears making dark tracks down her face, he was sure, were burning too.

When he told her to burn him up, he tried to make himself believe it was out of bravery. Trying to resolve the situation. Bullshit. He was doing what he always did, avoiding.

"I hate you." She spat the word with as much ire as she could, despite the break in her voice. "Because you knew."

She didn't kill him, the way he had asked her to. Just told him, not in so many words, that to her, he was dead already.

And as she walked out into an evening the color of molten rock, as he threw things in boxes while barely looking at him--all junk, anyway, bric-a-brac with big names attached--he knew he should've expected to run all along. It was all he knew.

He should've seen it coming. He had seen it coming. Right from the start, he had known.

**Author's Note:**

> I cried over Ned Chicane and now you have to as well. 
> 
> Shoutout to @tazscripts on tumblr for being an absolute godsend at all times and especially when plotting this fic.
> 
> Thank you for reading!!! Please consider commenting if you liked it!


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